5 reasons email subject lines are getting better

1) Crippling spam folder-phobia

Not only does getting flagged as spam decrease the number of recipients who interact with your brand’s campaign, but it can completely ruin your sender reputation hurting your brand’s future deliverability.

The good news is that it’s pretty easy not to write a spammy subject line. To avoid being labeled as spam, marketers are increasingly working to ensure their subject lines don’t sound shady, or try and trick their readers with clickbait language. Even when lame subject lines still manage to make it past the filters and into inboxes, annoying recipients with misleading subject lines will quickly lead to them unsubscribing or ignoring your emails in the future.

Fear of such consequences has forced email marketers to step their subject line game up industry wide.

2) AI assistance

There are many things AI can do more efficiently than humans can. It can even craft smart subject lines that convert!

While we’re not discounting copywriters’ intrinsic ability to understand an audience and create good copy, AI is able to consider a vastly greater number of factors to optimise a subject line. At Phrasee, our tech uses artificial intelligence to identify and quantify what makes customers respond to a brand’s messaging. Through machine learning and natural language generation technology, Phrasee figures out the sentiments a company’s customers connect with and then generates optimised copy to drive brand engagement. Even better, the more a brand uses Phrasee, the more Phrasee’s AI learns about the brand’s audience, using that deep understanding and knowledge to further craft copy that converts while still using the brand’s own unique voice.

3) Emojis

While some might says emojis are leading to the downfall of language as we know it, we say 🙄.

A picture says a thousand words, but a few well-placed emojis can say even more. That doesn’t mean that sprinkling in some emojis automatically strengthens a bad subject line (quite the opposite, in fact), but there’s no denying that they do amplify the language used in a good one.

This has become increasingly important in the never ending quest to stand out in today’s crowded inboxes. If the message in your subject line is spot on, the added boost of emoji power can help it connect with a brand’s subscribers even more.

And who doesn’t want that?

4) Tougher competition

The world is drowning in emails.

Even those who don’t regularly use email for work are still being inundated with all sorts of messages, from emails about their children’s schoolwork to follow-up emails from a company which sold them a hat 16 years ago, not to mention those cat videos their great aunt keeps sending.

Competition to capture eyeballs on emails is fierce, and standing out from the crowd is just getting tougher. To rise above the noise, companies need to pull out all the tricks when it comes to writing stellar subject lines. Tougher competition has forced marketers to rise to the challenge and make the most of their subject line copy.

5) Personalisation

Email marketing is getting personal.

From figuring out the optimal time to click “send” on a new campaign, to delivering more relevant content, email marketing personalisation can help more effectively target an audience.

Through better understanding a brand’s audience and personalising the emails subscribers receive accordingly, email marketers have been able to increase the performance of their campaigns massively. This process is no less relevant when it comes to developing an email subject line. What gets one person to open an email might not work for the next person, and brands and marketers are beginning to understand this.

The result has been an industry-wide shift away from the “batch and blast” campaigns of the past toward more user-friendly and customer centric subject line copy.